Apple tablet

Zwilnik Wrote:Multitasking is useful when you've got a 17" or above screen and fast computer but on a tablet device with a 1Ghz CPU (and integrated GPU) where you're only going to be working on or playing one thing at once, multitasking is a pain for games. You never know how much CPU power you'll get for your game because you don't know what apps the user has running in the background.

Apologist much? I used to have a 16MHz PowerBook with a 9" 640x400 b/w screen. It ran several programs at once and even had windows and stuff. Fast forward about a decade and I was running OS X just fine on a 233Mhz iMac. I regularly played games on it and even could run the email program and web browser at the same time to be able to copy paste between them. Absolutely brilliant! What will they think of next?

I just honestly don't see how people can legitimize this to themselves. Sure managing multiple windows on a 4" screen is less than useful, but switching pages in mobile safari is very useful. Why not allow that at an app level? That way I don't have to quit your game in order to switch to my IM program and reply to a message.

Skorche Wrote:That way I don't have to quit your game in order to switch to my IM program and reply to a message.

No but when my game is running full screen the apps in the background should be completely dead to the CPU and memory. Otherwise I have to design the game to a completely random specification as it depends on what you're running.

Console games generally do a lot more with theoretically lower spec hardware because devs can design to the fixed specification and use it knowing exactly how much speed and memory they'll get.

The iPad doesn't need multitasking as the interface and general design is based around you doing one thing at a time and you being focused on that, so it's somewhat academic that it doesn't have it.

I'm kind of in-between on this. I'm with Zwilnik on the being greedy about CPU cycles thing, as it gives a much more stable baseline of performance to develop for, and pretty much eliminates the dumb user saying my game sucks because it's too slow while they leave their browser on a busy page. As a developer I definitely like that. But OTOH, as a user, I like multi-tasked environments too. The chat example is a good one. Why can't they have at least some minimal amount of multi-tasking? Heck, maybe something like a PIP on a TV? At least you'd *know* you have another task running at the same time.

AnotherJake Wrote:I'm kind of in-between on this. I'm with Zwilnik on the being greedy about CPU cycles thing, as it gives a much more stable baseline of performance to develop for, and pretty much eliminates the dumb user saying my game sucks because it's too slow while they leave their browser on a busy page. As a developer I definitely like that. But OTOH, as a user, I like multi-tasked environments too. The chat example is a good one. Why can't they have at least some minimal amount of multi-tasking? Heck, maybe something like a PIP on a TV? At least you'd *know* you have another task running at the same time.

Only way I could see that working is if backgrounded apps were jailed to a specific limit of memory, so you could still be sure that you're getting a specific amount of system memory. Or perhaps they'd only get so much system memory, the rest would be paged? When playing with the memory manager, there's a lot you could do!

You're right, there'd have to be some physical memory limit. That reminds me that they'd also have to engineer some way of implementing the "PiP" thumbnail so that it wouldn't interfere with frame rate. Currently, having any UIKit widget over a GL context can destroy frame rate.

This not a trivial idea to implement, but everywhere I read, there are major complaints about the lack of multi-tasking. Apple will have to bow to the pressure at some point. I wonder how they'll solve it?

Skorche Wrote:Apologist much? I used to have a 16MHz PowerBook with a 9" 640x400 b/w screen. It ran several programs at once and even had windows and stuff. Fast forward about a decade and I was running OS X just fine on a 233Mhz iMac. I regularly played games on it and even could run the email program and web browser at the same time to be able to copy paste between them. Absolutely brilliant! What will they think of next?

I believe Apple is just trying condition the general public into getting use to this type of a device, and that eventually, after it catches on if in fact it does, that they'll start putting real operating systems in them in order to satisfy the rest of us.

I imagine multitasking is coming in a future version of iPhone OS - today was not to get people ogling the development & geek potential, but to concentrate on the hardware and the ideas of "what can I do with a tablet in my hand?"

I got one of my games running on the iPad sim. It was pretty easy. All I had to do was scale the graphics, add some letter/pillar boxing (very small amount), and scale the touch input values. Will need to add some higher quality graphics though. 3D games will have no problems porting to iPad at all since they're aspect, and largely resolution independent.

One thing I can say is that it looks like my MacBook doesn't have enough horsepower to run the iPad sim at full speed. Just guessing of course, but I'm assuming it's all software rendered, and that sim display is rather large! Buying an iPad would be cheaper than buying a faster computer to run the sim on

One issue that comes to mind is that making higher quality graphics is going to push a lot of people over the 10 MB cell distribution limit. I haven't checked lately, but is that still the limit? And if so, has there been any word that they might bump that limit up? Will the limit be applying to the 3G distribution for iPad too?

I've yet to download the new SDK as I don't have Snow Leopard yet, but I'm actually really excited about the iPad because the next game I am working on will probably work better on it than an iPhone/iPod touch. I'm particularly excited about doing a two-player game mode which involves the players competing against each other on opposite ends of the device.

I think the iPad will, even moreso than the iPhone/iPod touch, be really well suited to certain games, but some game types will just not be much fun. In the keynote I really liked the touch-and-turn mechanic of opening airlocks in NOVA, but the rest of it looked hard to control. With such a large device the use of touch-and-slide to look around in an FPS would be very difficult.

monteboyd Wrote:I think the iPad will, even moreso than the iPhone/iPod touch, be really well suited to certain games, but some game types will just not be much fun. In the keynote I really liked the touch-and-turn mechanic of opening airlocks in NOVA, but the rest of it looked hard to control. With such a large device the use of touch-and-slide to look around in an FPS would be very difficult.

I love the potential for interactive environments with the touch-screen, but on the other hand, it seems as though it would be *really* hard to walk the line between making games easy to play and keeping them immersive.
The touch-and-turn mechanic was a good example of touchscreen use in my opinion, but the target system seemed as though it might take something away from the gameplay.

The iPad itselfâ€¦ I tell myself that I don't need one, that it doesn't have multitasking, and that I'll just wait until the second generation to see what happens, but I'll see how steadfast my resolve is when they hit the market.